Behind Hitler's Lines (46 page)

“As I leaned on the hull to commence fire I heard the driver dying inside. That was horrible, and I shot off a whole drum in two bursts, screaming in English as I did. Maybe the krauts wondered which front they were on! They started sending fire at me, and that helped the Mongols close in on them. Then there were plenty of screams and yells on both sides. These were die-hard SS troops, and we made sure they died hard. Some flamethrowers came up from the rear. Their nickname was wiener roasters. They weren't needed this time—the Mongols had done the job without them—but the flamethrowers wanted to participate, so they finished off the wounded. For disease control it was normal to cremate the dead. So what if these Hitlerites weren't quite dead?

“My last morning with the battalion was clear, dry, cold but sunny. By normal rotation I was back on Major's tank. As
usual we moved out at dawn. A Sherman makes a lot of noise. I couldn't hear anything but noticed the infantry scatter. Then there was a high whine. A flight of Stukas dove down from the east, out of the rising sun. I saw the bombs grow larger; that's the last thing I saw or remembered for a while.”

A bomb blew Joe off the tank. He woke up in a ditch with a medic bending over him. Major was observing with her hands on hips. He'd taken a piece of shrapnel in the groin. The medic was packing the wound with snow. Joe had also been hit in the right knee but didn't realize it because the groin wound was so painful, the worst pain since Berlin. When the medic turned back Joe's overcoat, blood gushed out. When Major saw that she shaded her eyes. My God, he thought, she must have seen much worse than this, or else I'm about to die.

Major had lost her husband at Demyansk, in the same battle that the Wehrmacht lieutenant colonel who saved Joe from the Gestapo had lost most of his leg. Joe was in shock but also shocked that she was making a scene over him. She bent down and said something like Schultz had told him: go home now to your family; the war will be over.
Proshchai tovarish.

Joe managed a salute, but she was jogging back to her tank. In the turret Major turned to look at him before yelling her war cry. It sounded different. Her eyes were also swimming.

“Our time together had been brief but like no other I've ever heard of. She felt it, I felt it, and we stared at each other as we both realized it. Of all the people who may have survived World War II, I wish I knew if she is still alive. And if she is, I'd go to Russia just to see her—my major, my CO, my second Wolverton—who was a woman.

“Her infantry was advancing as I was put on a stretcher. Some gave me the V for victory and shouted, 'Berlin!' They must have known I couldn't go with them but pretended I would. It was thirty-seven years before I reached Berlin, but at least I was alive to do it. Very few of them, I'm afraid, ever got there.”

When presented forecasts of the cost to crush the heart of the Third Reich in its capital, Eisenhower set aside a plan to
drop the 101st on the outskirts of the city, thereby giving over the honor and horror of capturing Berlin to Zhukov. Starting from their attack across the Oder, a quarter million Russians died to take Berlin, about the same number the Germans lost at Stalingrad—and nearly the total of American dead in World War II.

“so
I'D NOW LIKE
to salute and say,
Proshchai tovarish.
You took it to the end. More than anyone else you won the war.” And with it, Joe's heart.

“
I'D HAD MY SHARE OF PAIN IN THIS WAR. I WAS RUNNING OUT
of whatever it takes to deal with pain. You have to take it because there's nothing to do about it, but on top of that you feel the reserve tank going dry. Then you have to accept that too. Accepting that is accepting death, whether you're ready or not. Now I didn't feel I was ready anymore—not like Berlin when I was ready to take a bullet in the head. The difference was being free again, a soldier with a weapon and a lot to live for, including revenge. My battalion took revenge the way they took vodka. It was something like compensation. It had kept my new buddies going, right out there where death was facing them across the Oder.”

It was infuriating that he could no longer take revenge, the vodka of a soldier's soul. Now wounded worse than ever before, Joe watched himself slipping toward a final weakness and nadir of the psyche. What he saw was his young but much tried body going to the rear: in one of myriad trickles of casualties that became streams, then a river, filtering through eddies, many men dying, fewer continuing, all stopping here or there with Halloween masks of pain, body parts grotesquely mutilated, gasping voices heralding premature death for boys sucked down by the whirlpool of pitiless war between two pitiless tyrants. Like an oddly colored leaf, he was being caught in that vortex, but unlike the Russians he was not prepared to go gentle. And he didn't feel justified to go. As back at the
prison farmhouse at St. Come-du-Mont, there were so many other wounded worse off than he.

Somewhere behind the front, Joe was pulled out of the flow when his medics indicated there were certain Russians nearby who wanted to speak with him. They were a unique group of about a hundred technical officers and NCOs who had been following the advance but hadn't done any fighting. To Joe that sounded like a good outfit to be with.

He asked them who they were, and after a little hesitation they didn't mind revealing it was a rocket research unit. Some of them spoke English because they were scientists in uniform.

To Joe, rockets meant Katyushas, but the scientists just smiled when he said so. Their goal was not Berlin but a town about a hundred miles north of there, Peenemunde, on the Baltic Sea, where V-2 guided missiles were tested before being launched against England. Peenemunde was second only to Berlin in Stalin's priorities. This unit lived well and bragged how they could order generals around. Much later Joe learned that they succeeded in their mission of capturing most of the top German rocket scientists—Wernher von Braun was the exception—thus beginning the Soviet space and ICBM program, which became the biggest threat to the West in the Cold War. Back in the States Joe's debriefers were most interested in this unit. He was the only American who ever had any contact with it.

“They were a threat to my health at the time!” Joe said. “I had bomb fragments in my groin and knee and should have been moved back immediately in medical channels. The rocket scientists must have known that I needed treatment, but they had this rare opportunity to talk to an American, so they detained me though I could tell they didn't feel really good about doing it. They compensated by giving me plenty of the all-purpose medicine: vodka. I had a ton of fever from infection and barely recall anything we talked about except American industry in general.

“They weren't interrogating me, they were just very curious about how things worked in a democracy. One scientist was pretty outspoken; he said minds couldn't do their best
when they were under government control. I don't think the research unit had a commissar, but this guy's colleagues told him to keep such opinions to himself. Shut up, in other words, because there was no telling where 'Sergeant Yosef'—that's what they called me—would go or who I would speak to. They were right to be suspicious. My debriefers in the States were very anxious to know this officer's name and were frustrated that I'd forgotten it. They showed me some photos, but he wasn't among them.”

Upon his return to the United States, Joe, still in uniform, was offered to a press conference because of his unique experiences. The officer in charge abruptly terminated the interview when Joe reached this point in his time with the Russians. A secondary reason for sending the reporters away was that Joe was insinuating “political” views about the USSR. He'd expressed that he liked Hitlerism only slightly less than Stalinism. At this point in 1945 it was not yet politically correct to make such a comparison.

“I was released by the rocket scientists to the care of a woman doctor they knew. She took a liking to me and treated me with everything she had. So I arrived at a field hospital as a special patient, as much as an enlisted man could be. There wasn't much medically, but the food was better than anything on the front lines. There was not only
kasca
but also thick soup with bread, sausage, and scalding hot tea.”

He was told this field hospital was near an unpronounceable Polish town the Germans had renamed Landsberg in what they called Silesia.
^*
The hospital was formerly a school-house. There were blackboards that still had German writing on them. In Joe's small ward were a dozen beds and four dozen mattresses on the floor. It was as much a morgue as a recovery/emergency room. There was not even a stove, so covers were piled on the wounded, layers up to a foot thick, a tapestry of sheets, blankets, throws, spreads, and rugs confiscated from German houses.

“We still shivered with cold,” Joe remembers. “I've often wondered why under such unsanitary conditions our wounds didn't become infected enough to kill us, though many died every day. Maybe the cold kept infection from spreading.

“The ward was purgatory. I've read a lot about the Civil War, how wounds were judged. If you were hit in a limb, you could hope to survive an amputation. Hit in the body and you'd better forget about this world and get ready for the next. It was just that way in Landsberg. Soldiers hit in the chest or gut were just trying to find peace and die. They all seemed to be communicating with their mother. Trouble was they were in the most pain and had no painkiller except vodka. The medics, triaging, didn't pay much attention to them. I couldn't help but pay attention. Theirs were like the cries I'd heard in my mind in Berlin. Only God knows how much suffering it takes to fight a war.”

Joe was still pretty much his own and only doctor with a grim prognosis: he had a new extremity wound but also a much more significant one in the body that had received no treatment except snow, vodka, and sulfa powder. Nevertheless he felt that if someone would just take the metal out of his knee and groin, he'd have a fighting chance.

In an American field hospital a guy would bitch and yell till a doctor came along and removed the bomb fragments in a proper operation. Russians in the beds beside Joe made no such demands, though they were at least as bad off. But he was an American and made his feelings known. A woman doctor came along and said she'd heard what he wanted. Joe nodded. Okay—she took out forceps, threw back the sheets, and pulled out the fragments on the spot.

“I screamed louder than any of my fellow patients ever had. It was like pulling wisdom teeth, appendix, and tonsils one after another—without even a shot of vodka for anesthetic. She seemed to be saying, hey, soldier, this is the Eastern Front—get used to it. I felt I'd done all I could do for myself at that point. If only I could have a little painkiller, I was ready to die again.

“I wanted to. Where there had been bomb fragments there
were now big holes. A medic packed them with sulfa, or something like it, that burned like hell. I could feel myself growing weaker as I thrashed around in pain. The wounds kept draining. Usually the medics were too busy to change the dressings, so I'd turn them over till both sides were soaked, then ask for more. The new ones were taken from Wehrmacht casualties. They didn't get any.

“I'd reached another low in my young life. I'd been praying, but the purpose had changed. Before I'd prayed to get away and be a credit to my family and country. I felt I'd done that with God's help; now I was free but dying among people who cared about me. So what was I to pray for? I needed to get away from the caregivers, into the hands of American doctors. I was sure they could bring me back to life.”

God stepped in once more. One afternoon there was the biggest commotion Joe had witnessed since Rommel's visit back in France. Doctors and medics came around to check all the patients, changing dressings, laying on new blankets, plumping pillows, and generally straightening up. From nearby wards Joe faintly heard something like
Ohh-ah
among the wounded. A VIP was coming through the hospital—that was the word spread around the ward. A Russian word Joe knew was “who?” A nurse looked at him proudly and announced it was none other than Marshal Georgi Zhukov. As good generals do, he was visiting unfortunate men to whom he owed his fortunes.

Zhukov came in at the opposite end of the ward from where Joe's bed was, so Joe could view the marshal's progress down the slew of beds and mattresses. The patients looked at him like he was the pope rather than a general. They praised him to his face before he could say a word. He didn't have to. Zhukov was the most impressive general Joe ever saw, including Ike, Montgomery, and Rommel. The first two were sort of slouchy and casual, qualities that appealed to soldiers of a democracy. Rommel was all business, coldly yet charis-matically professional. Zhukov had a bearing, a presence resembling Churchill's but more victoriously erect. He carried himself the way Russia was carrying out the war: with much
pride, and understanding of the suffering necessary for victory. He was a great captain. On the one hundredth anniversary of Zhukov's birth, the U.S. Army held a symposium about him at Fort McNair, which Joe attended.

His most noticeable feature was a large dimple in his chin. It would have almost been cute had not his chiseled face commanded instant and sober respect. He was accompanied by an English-speaking officer, who came to Joe's bed and identified him as the American casualty. Zhukov reached out with a crushing handshake. It was painful to bend forward, but Joe was proud to do so.

Russia's premier marshal looked him over as if “Yo” were a kid who'd done all right in school, nothing great but adequate. The interpreter whispered that Joe was a paratrooper. Zhukov brightened, flashing a smile of bemusement and amusement. He'd heard that D Day drops were widely dispersed but

“Did Yo drift all the way to Poland?”

Everyone within earshot broke into laughter, a venting laughter when there had been little humorous in their lives. In quick, clipped tones Zhukov expressed the wish that he could have more time to hear about the American Airborne. He ordered his chief of staff that when Joe recovered he was to report to Zhukov's headquarters for a debriefing.